I believe the closer imagery is from aircraft, not satellites.

I've owned a 3G, 3GS and 4; wife has a 4S. There is absolutely lag in the soft answer button from time to time. I am not sure what background task is causing it, and while it's true that it's nonexistent on a factory-fresh, no-apps-installed phone, that's not a realistic use case.

Ubuntu in 12.04? No thanks. The last Ubuntu I took seriously was 11.04, and if I recall I started using Ubuntu in the 7.x or 8.x release cycle. I still have a couple of those 11.04 systems going. The rest have gone to Debian+XFCE. It seems with every new release of Ubuntu takes their desktop one step closer to a Fischer-Price toy, and I just got sick of it.

Yes, I can install Xubuntu (I was actually running Kubuntu for a number of releases until I finally gave up on KDE doing something serious about being a stable and well-connected desktop, and I've been a KDE fan since the early 3.x releases). Yes, I can tweak the shit out of everything and reclaim some sanity. Instead, I just install Debian and put up with some of its idiosyncrasies. At least I have a system that is constantly making me want to throw the keyboard through the screen.

I moved from Slackware (0.9something to 12) to Ubuntu, and now to Debian. Ubuntu was great; it was really, really great. I don't feel that way anymore. They seem to be chasing buzz and trying to out-slick everyone instead of focusing on a usable and useful desktop experience.

No, I'm sorry. Horrowitz' "Art of Electronics" is *NOT* the best book. It's a big book, I'll grant you that, but it's actually pretty difficult to get started with such a book unless you are good at learning from textbooks. I sure as hell am not. It's far from practical.

It may sound like I'm being a little bit of an ass, but seriously... Forrest M Mims' "Getting Started in Electronics" followed with all of his Engineer's Mini Notebooks are an excellent resource. After that grab anything you can by Robert Grossblatt. Use AoE for a reference but not for a learning guide. the electronics.stackexchange.com site isn't too bad, either.

You don't learn a language -- any language -- in 3 days. He may have started doing some neat things with it in three days, I don't doubt that... but learned it? No.

It's also great for one-man shops. I love the fact that I have the entire repo on my laptop when I'm at an airport or stuck somewhere with shitty/no internet access. You can queue up all your commits, branch, merge, do whatever you need and push it back out when you're done.

You could do the same if you used a local cvs/svn/whatever server but it's not nearly as good when you have to start sharing code with the customer or with a larger team.

Nah. I'm an old KDE guy who's moved on (xfce on linux, osx for my main computer now). I *loved* Kate. It was a perfect little editor for when I didn't want to be in vim.

I agree; there is a massive opportunity here to capitalize on the synergy of Martian Control and lolcats. I sense an RSS feed in the making.

I don't think that you realize who's paying HR's check. Hint: it ain't you.

HR is there to make sure the company is not open to lawsuits, and to make you feel like you're being heard. They *do* raise the issues you bring to them to management, but that's nothing you can't do on your own. HR is certainly NOT on your side. I'm not sure where you got such a naive idea.

It'd be a wonderful language that does prevent all of these things without sacrificing the ability to do something because you do in fact know better than the compiler. I disagree with you about relying on compiler warnings. Use -Werror and get used to it. Use a lint utility and develop good coding habits. It's not impossible to write solid code in C, and it's not (much) harder to do than in other languages, either. With the exception of ambiguous statements which I agree with you on, -Werror takes care of a lot of the "duh" problems, and decent code reviews take care of stupid logic, which is a problem in any language.

What you wrote has absolutely nothing to do with C and everything to do with human beings. If your code is not going through a review process where you have a team go through a module at a time, preferably over beer and pizza... you're already creating this problem. Diligence is required in any language, and I'd argue for any profession.

I have no idea what you're talking about. I too have been doing embedded systems design (hw, sw, the whole kit and kaboodle) for about the same amount of time as you and no, I do not think that C is too hard. Not at all.There are little things I'd like to change about it, but not because it's too hard.

No, we stick with C because it is a great middle ground between assembly and high level languages. I would not want to write Python or Java on little microcontrollers. C is a small enough language that lets you write complex code relatively easily while staying close to the hardware.

C's got its warts, it's true. It's a mature language that leaves the programmer in control of the system. It's not supposed to do the fancy things such as garbage collection, object management and so on. I'm glad it doesn't. There are other languages for that.

Illustrating C by Donald Alcock is pretty good.

I think that your networking requirement is correct, but you don't get much out of networking in university or college. You get your jobs from networking with employers or those who can employ you much less than your peers who are already employed, and you gain access to that through many avenues in addition to the job fairs and co-op opportunities at school.